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The Sanity Dashboard is the new entry point for all users, and the new home for your studios, your embedded apps, for Canvas, for your Media Library, and for your Sanity Insights.
It adds a new and much needed “higher layer” to the Sanity Content Operating System that allows easy traversal between studios and apps, and provides the container for accessing each aspect of Sanity.
The age of the Headless CMS is over. Welcome to the era of “The Content Operating System”.
Learn more about the Sanity Spring Release in our Sanity Spring Release Overview article.
Why the Dashboard?
Until now, when working in Sanity you most likely went to one specific URL for your Studio. This was the home of all things content, and you’d log in and manage content from within it. There were Tools that gave you different views of your content, such as Media Library or Presentation, but it was all hosted and accessed in the Studio.
Then came along Sanity Create (now called Sanity Canvas). This was a completely new tool, and rather than host it in the Studio, it gained its own URL as its entry point.
Users now needed to switch between the Canvas and their Studio by remembering different URLs, and with this paradigm, things felt disconnected. It didn’t feel like a single ecosystem, but rather two apps with some glue between.
With the Spring Release, Sanity also brought out more apps, such as a brand new Media Library, and Sanity Insights. These again would not be added to the Studio as Tools, but would be separate apps outside of the Studio. They had a higher level of context than the Studio, as they can work across studios and even across projects.
Sanity needed a container that could wrap this higher level of context, and that’s exactly what the Dashboard is.
The new Home of Sanity
You can now access your Sanity Dashboard via https://sanity.io/welcome, where you’ll be able to pick which organisation you want to view the Dashboard for, and clicking on one will take you to the Dashboard view.
Once it’s been configured, you’ll see your Studio(s), Canvas, Media Library, and any other custom apps that have been embedded here.
You can quickly switch between your different apps
Embedded Apps in the Dashboard
You can embed custom apps into your Dashboard that have been built with the App SDK. This allows easy access to customised content experiences without giving access to the more complicated Studio interface.
For example, a worldwide charity may expose a custom app to let workers on the ground upload candid videos of the work they’re doing so that the charity can better communicate exactly where its donations are being spent, and connected donors with to-the-minute updates, for a powerful, emotional connection.
Using a custom app for this removes the burden of CMS training, and gives a use-case specific interface that’s still backed by the powerful Content Lake and Live Content API from Sanity.
The Dashboard allows your users to move between these custom apps and Sanity apps with ease.
Learn more about embedded apps and the App SDK in our App SDK deep dive article.
Conclusion
We’re really excited by the completion of Sanity’s vision, and the move to a full blown Content Operating System. There are so many opportunities now for organisations to create exactly what they need, and Sanity are producing an incredible toolset to make that happen.
If you’re not working with Sanity yet, you should seriously consider why that is.
And if you’re ready to find out more, email us for a chat at hello@hexdigital.com.